When making adjustments to your life, especially where they require a change of long standing habits, there isn’t a solution which suits everyone. The fundamentals of change are always in play, but the application of them is where you see variance. For losing weight, you combine cutting calories with moving more. That is the fundamental rule. The ratio in which you do this, as well as how much you adjust your types of food, what types of exercise you take, and the timings and frequency of this, all determine how successful you might be. Getting this wrong is where most people fail when trying to make a change. Often, it’s either too much too quickly, or choosing a plan which doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle.
I want to write about this, as I have struggled to keep with my plan since I last wrote. I have exercised a bit less, and this has impacted my motivation, meaning I have put less focus on my food. Thankfully, the groundwork and efforts I still put in mean I’ve not seen any negative results, but the forward momentum has stalled. The reason for this is a change which didn’t suit my lifestyle and my commitments, causing disruption to everything I was doing. The change I put in was Crossfit, which in itself has been awesome, but overall hasn’t worked for me at all.
Since starting this journey, my exercise has been fairly unstructured. I have made sure I hit a number of sessions in a week, and mix up the exercises I perform, but the days I do it and the time of day have always been flexible. I’m lucky to have everything I need to work out in my garage, which is open whenever I want to exercise. In signing up for Crossfit, a large part of my exercise routine had to be based around a timetable. It had to be structured to follow class times, availability of spaces in those classes, and also a small factor of the journey to get to the class. For a morning or evening workout, this generally meant signing up to a session days in advance. In addition, as Crossfit can be quite intensive, so I also had to structure my other exercises around it. If I was attending a Crossfit class during a lunch break one day, I couldn’t really do a decent workout the night before at home. These limitations and structures haven’t been working for me at all.
Crossfit has taught me an awful lot about performing different exercises, correct form for those exercises I was already doing, and how I can further push myself. A good amount of what I’ve learnt I’ve taken home to my own gym, to further enhance my workouts. It’s been a very valuable experience, and if an exercise routine based around timings and structure work for you, I’d thoroughly recommend giving it a try.
Finding the motivation and focus to make a change is the first step to achieving results. Finding a system and routine which works for you is key to the success of achieving those results. If things aren’t working for you, change them. Work out what suits you, and what you can do to make it easiest on yourself to change those habits you want to remove. There’s no right answer for everyone, so keep working away at finding the answer which works for you.
